Bloomsbury
Review by Brian Tanguay
I had to read Alan Moore’s The Great When twice to fully appreciate it. At the time I wasn’t at all familiar with Moore’s body of work, but that book made me an admirer and when the second installment of his Long London series came out I was keen to read it. Moore builds on the fantastical world he introduced in The Great When. The same cast of extraordinary characters return a decade or so later to a London that’s in much better condition than it was immediately after World War II, when swaths of the city were bombed-out and the economy was in shambles. But while Britain has mostly recovered, its far-flung colonial empire is coming apart at the seams; the Brits got themselves in a terrible mess over the Suez Canal from which they won’t recover.
Dennis Knuckleyard’s circumstances are somewhat improved in that he’s no longer under the thumb of his former employer and landlady, Coffin Ada Benson, a chain-smoking source of non-stop vitriol. Dennis now makes his living as a freelance writer, primarily of fictional pornographic letters for a men’s magazine. Dennis is still awkward and unsure of himself, prone to getting in his own way, and his love life is sporadic, but at least he’s found relief from his mind-warping adventures in the other London and he hopes to keep it that way. Of course, the Great When has other plans, not only for Dennis, but for the young lass he really loves, red-haired Grace Shilling, former prostitute, and now a dancer at a club. They will be yanked into another harrowing adventure involving a key, a manic music producer, and a diminutive killer by the name of Button Dainty.
Moore’s prose is as wild and unrestrained as the tale he tells, and it flows like an elaborate and vivid dream. Here’s one example:
“And Slenderhorse is made of moving crayon swipes, of crinkling tinsel bulbs…drawn and erased, drawn and erased again at every upstart instant’s tick, the practice sketch of a young girl, clad in the tentative impression of a tunic that has hanging folds of pleated light…she perches on her robust equine skeleton that shakes its skull impatiently, a sound like rattling die, and stares from empty holes with minor chips and cracks about their ivory orbits…one cavity has a cobweb as pretended retina…”
Strange beings with strange names and stranger powers. Monolulu. Commotion Venables. Ironfoot. But as much as this novel takes place in the other London, the fantastic and terrifying different city, it also unfolds in locales like Notting Hill, Soho, and Kensington. Britain is changing as immigrants from the former colonies arrive, altering the character of neighborhoods and sparking clashes with white locals. Moore deftly weaves just the right amount of historical and social context into his tale — international events like Fidel Castro’s revolution in Cuba in 1959, and the steady beat of Rock and Roll as it begins to dominate the airwaves.
How long can Dennis and Grace straddle these two worlds, one ever-changing and the other filled with terrors past and present? Will they ever escape the pull of the Great When? Fans of this series will hope not.
